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There comes a time when a company needs to diversify and invest some money in other enterprises and ventures that will provide it with increased profits and increased chances of staying afloat and profitable. This is true for every smartly-run business that wants to remain relevant and that needs to be secured in case something goes wrong. But, how exactly is a business owner, a company manager or a CEO to do this the smart way.

Choosing the right investment

The first and the most crucial step is deciding where to invest and how to invest. For a business owner who is not that versed in investing money in markets that are not in their own industry, this can be a challenge. There are so many ways in which a company owner can invest that the choice can become quite a strenuous issue.

For instance, is the real estate market the right place to invest? Most investment experts will agree that it is always a good idea to invest in realty, especially in stabilized economies and areas where the realty values are expected to rise for a long time to come.

Perhaps the stock market is the right place to put your money in. If you can find a great broker and if you have the money to invest in stocks, this may be a great idea for diversifying the company’s portfolio and making it stronger.

For some business owners, the penny stock market might actually be the best choice, with smaller initial investments and with less time needed for the shares to rise in value and bring in profit. Or perhaps the best thing for your particular business is to invest in bonds.

Understanding the risks

Every investment is a risk. Some investments are not as risky as others, but it is unrealistic to say that there is an investment which is bullet proof and which does not entail a certain level of liability. It is just the way things are and if it weren’t, we would all be millionaires.

It is, however, important to understand the risk and perhaps to have someone help you analyze these risks and provide you with advice. If you are not sure about who to call for help, a consulting company like Globality Consulting can find the right person or firm that will help you with this.

It is essential that you have all the facts and all the data that will help you decide on an investment option that will best benefit your business.

Not being afraid

Once you have analyzed the risks or once you had someone do it for you, it is time to pull the trigger, so to say and this is where you need to be brave. Not foolish, but brave. For instance, penny stocks are a market that is often vilified as being very risky and it is. However, it is not insanity to invest a portion of the businesses’ income in this market, especially if you can get help from true masters in the field who can help you find out how to invest smartly and reduce the risks.

Analyzing the results

The final step is knowing how to analyze the results and how to predict future outcome. This can sometimes be a very difficult thing to do, but with a bit of help and with some training and practice, you can do this. This is important because you need to keep an eye on your investments, noticing when things may not be going your way and getting out of such investments in time. Investing is not a thing you do once and then forget about it. It is something you need to stay involved in and something you need to keep an eye on.

Outsourcing meant for those Entrepreneurs and Business owners who understand that they can make profits with virtual teams rather than blocking their money on maintaining infrastructure or getting into hassles of operations and people management. Despite of known pros and cons of outsourcing, these entrepreneurs prefer to choose an outsourcing partner through which they can accelerate their revenue growth, focus on marketing and keep them upgraded all the time on latest technology updates.

There are many suggestions, reviews, company experiences etc. available on internet that one can read and think through while deciding on outsourcing vendor. However, none of them guarantees that you will choose the right outsourcing partner. There are no well-defined means or tools available, which can justify that your selected vendor can deliver on time without compromising the quality and hurting budget.

Few of the important and popular tips are:

1) Value Addition:Find out how your outsourcing partner can help you in increase the value addition to your customers without increasing the cost and stretching time-frame. They should be able to recommend ideas, way to optimize the solution etc.

2) Quality Assurance:
It is MOST important to know what quality measures the vendor has. How they assure that they have proper QA process, methods and tools within the company. Will they be charging extra for tools? How understand the business flow and log the relevant bugs etc.

3) Data Security:You will not like your business ideas, files or any data publically available or used for other projects etc. It is imperative that you find out what security measures vendor take to secure the data without any exceptions.

4) Proven records and References:
It is worth to find out the experience and expertise of the vendor. What kind of customer they have supported, industry they have catered, projects they have worked on, which technology they have expertise in and what their current customer have to say about their services. They should also be open to share the example and sample of the work they did in past.

If the vendor is new, it is worth finding out how trustworthy they can be and how they can support your project, what experience they are bringing in at individual level.

5) Similar Goals and Aims:
Find out whether business goal and aims of yours and your potential offshore development partner are same or not.

6) Flexibility and Post development support:
It is important to find out how flexible vendor is when it comes to adjusting urgent support requirements at odd hours, supporting in your time zone, any hidden cost, open for discussion with developers etc. Management of vendor should be open for making changes to the team in professional manner, without affecting the productivity as and when require.

7) Human Resource Management:
Find out how vendor keep their resources motivated, what HR policies they have in place to secure the knowledge transfer, what is the attrition rate of the company, how they develop the skill set of resources and how much experience resources have who are supporting your project etc.

There are many other tips and methods available over net. One could easily spend good amount of time and prepare a big checklist for vendor selection. However, there will always be one question – how will you believe that information which you collected is CORRECT?

How Globality Consulting helps:
Sales consultants at Globality consulting work closely with entrepreneurs and decision makers and help them to connect with right solution provider by acting as bridge between them and saving their valuable time which they earlier used to spend on searching offshore development partner, validating their credibility and monitoring the development on day-to-day basis. You can connect with one of our consultants at hello@globalityconsulting.com for more details.

Success of outsourcing has always been debatable from the day of its existence. Every business owner who is willing to outsource their software development requirements to IT solution providers in India or any other developing country will always evaluate the pros and cons of outsourcing process. In today’s aggressive competition businesses face huge cost pressure and outsourcing their IT project management and development requirement becomes a natural option for cost effective operations.
There are several research reports in market which portray more complex picture of outsourcing wherein organizations are not very satisfied with their current contracts or they are losing confidence in one or other projects. Few of them are considering renegotiating their existing outsourcing contracts or changing the outsourcing partners.

It is really important for business owners to understand the possible pitfalls in outsourcing and how to decide the aces and ploys of outsourcing.

Advantages of Outsourcing:

Most important factor which business owners enjoy is the cost efficiency in getting their strategy executed. Lower labour and operation cost makes IT leaders a natural supporter of outsourcing.

Business owners can focus on core activities of their business such as making new strategies to gain new market, sales and marketing activities etc. instead of worrying about their non-core activities.

Outsourcing can help you in streamlining the finances and cash-flow in a focused and with well-defined strategy.

Turnaround rate of deliverable is topped up with offshore workforce teams and you can align your resources for working on more projects.

Outsourcing IT services enables business owners to save money on investments on technology and developers and allows them to spend that amount in hiring resources related to their core functions.

Round the clock support and access to workforce for 24/7. It provides flexibility to realign the resources according to needs and help business owners to focus on gaining new clients.

Disadvantages of Outsourcing:

The biggest risk in outsourcing is the security of data and information. Lack of proper NDA and other agreements have resulted in leak of information’s and sensitive data.

Quality is a major concern and business owner’s end up spending a lot on deliverables which are not up-to the mark. This generally happens when the outsourcing vendor is not experienced or there are no quality processes.

At times business owners end up losing control on the operations and deliverables of the outsourced tasks.

Lack of defined SLA’s is also one of the main disadvantages of outsourcing. It is always recommended to have detailed SLA’s and cover each and every aspect of business unit to avoid any disappointments at later stages which either can be related to hidden costs or missing features from the deliverable.

Putting all the eggs in one basket does increase the risk of outsourcing failures. If you are associated with only one software vendor and that vendor goes bankrupt or due to some policy changes they ask to redefine the agreement, you might not enjoy it.

Communication and management of tasks in different time zones is another possible issue which business owners faces when they outsource their software and IT project management services.

Trust factor plays important role. It gets worst when business owners noticed lack of transparency from team working on outsourced tasks. It could be due to number of projects offshore team is handling or real experience of resources who are assigned to the projects.

These are only few of the pros and cons of outsourcing software services. Multiple issues may crop up without the clear understanding on projects, objectives etc. Maintaining transparency through project status, regular calls between client and offshore teams are the few main factors which define the outsourcing relationship.

Service Outsourcing has been a valuable strategy from day one of its existence and has played a crucial role in aggressive and structured growth of Software or IT industry across the world. It is very important for developing countries such as India, Ukraine or China to understand that service outsourcing is not only improvising the IT industry, it is also improving the economy and thus it our responsibility that every active participant of this industry should do a good job and make it a successful and stress-free process.

My current article/blog is useful for all those business owners who are looking for a software development companies and have struggled to get quality deliverables and software development companies who are offering their services. Being associated with an IT industry for more than a decade as a client engagement consultant, I’ve seen many outsourcing engagements getting failed on minor and major issues and have seen business owners losing their confidence in outsourcing.

There are certain things which every business owner and service provider should keep in mindbefore getting into a business engagement to avoid losing the charm of working and learning together. These pointers depict my industry experience and feedbacks which I got from my clients/mentors.

1. Project Deliveries are must: This is most important thing which defines the success of your partnership. Delivering the solution ON TIME and ON BUDGET is what every business owner wants from their solution providers, however delivering the product or solution which meets or better, yet Exceeds client expectation is what service provider has to aim for.

2. Communicate and Communicate: Another most important factor which defines whether your partnership is worth or not. Transparency is a key here and any side which is not communicating may or will result in deliverables which are either not expected or buggy.

• As a service provider, if you notice that deliverable is getting late, let client know as soon as you are aware instead of waiting for the due date or any pre-scheduled meeting.

• As a business owner, if you notice something which needs to fixed, changed or can have an impact on deliverables then let the service provider know to avoid delays.

3. Client is not a Google or Wiki: As a solution provider, if you come across any problem while executing the project (late deliverable, requirements which are not met, etc.), don’t just assume that client will know the solution for it. You have to reach out to client but with few options/solutions that can address them and hopefully fix them.

4. Consistency and Quality Assurance: Missing client reviews, untested solution are big reasons for frustrations. No one likes to see half-cooked solution or waiting for feedbacks or stuff to review.

• As a solution provider, you got to make sure that you are delivering a quality solution each time, not just at the end of a project. Client reviews are must and shall be taken very seriously. A thorough QA is must on each module which goes to client for review and confirm whether solution is as per expectations.

• As a business owner, you should give the honest feedback considering that module as a milestone. If something is missing, you should report that and if any changes are must then you can update the CR’s form.

5. Game of Project Plan: Most projects fail to adhere to the timelines defined in it. Project plan, created by a service providers which includes work break down structure, resources allocated etc. and to make sure that deliverables happen on time. Both business owners and service provider’s needs to make sure that:

• Timelines mentioned in project plan should include time for thorough QA and time to make any fixes as a result of the QA

• Project manager should review the solution, no matter whether a QA member is working on the project or not. PM hours defined in Project plan should cover it.

6. Over Commitment kills: Client is getting mad, team is getting frustrated and hours are increasing like price of petrol. Companies are missing deadlines, tasks which should have taken XX hours are taking XX days. This is another reason outsourcing partnerships don’t work.

• As a service provider, your PM’s should carefully commits on timelines to business owners and then should stick to it and get back to the client when they say they will. It is advisable that Project Managers should consult with their teams and understand what client is asking is possible to carry out and if yes then in what time duration.

• As a business owner, you should cross check with project managers on timelines and understand that sometimes it’s not possible to discuss and start all the Change requests on a go.

7. Client is a King: One who pays for the project is always right, provided as a service provider you understand what client needs.

• No matter what service provider says, result of each activity and tasks has to make client feel that they are your top priority and you are working towards exceeding their expectations.

• Business owners should also understand that they don’t take things for granted. If something has not been addressed by team, try to get the details before thinking otherwise. It’s true that you are paying for team, but few things cannot be purchased and they too are human!

These are very common things and we might come across many of them on daily basis, however if you observer closely they are quite major and important. It’s surprising to see how easily you can remove your stress and make a successful engagement. We just cannot ignore all of them especially when we are one of the active players in outsourcing industry.